


Candid Review of a Fine Play

by clearinghouse



Category: Sherlock Holmes (BBC Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Community: holmestice, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Gen, POV John Watson, Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 17:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12753231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clearinghouse/pseuds/clearinghouse
Summary: During the events of “The Lion’s Mane,” when Watson brings William Gillette’s famous playSherlock Holmesto Holmes’s attention, Holmes has strangely little to say about it—that is, until Watson takes him to see the play afterwards. Then, Holmes does have a review to give, and it is not at all the apathetic assessment that Watson had anticipated.





	Candid Review of a Fine Play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sanguinity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/gifts).



> Written for the Winter 2017 Holmestice Exchange, as an extension to the conversation between Holmes and Watson in the BBC's dramatisation of "The Lion's Mane" when Holmes reads some of Gillette's script.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to share my views on the subject of the now-famous play that draws its inspiration from my humble efforts to chronicle the fascinating adventures of my singular friend and colleague. I will now endeavour to give what I hope will be a satisfactory reply. It may be observed that it has been six years since the original production of the play, and the piece that I am remarking upon at present is, in fact, the revival of the play. However, as neither the script and its directions nor the actor portraying the leading man has been altered since the original, the following commentary, though late, ought to apply to both productions. 

I confess also that I never intended to give any answer to the demands for my review. One feels that there are others infinitely more qualified to critique the drama than myself, especially when one considers my unique position as the drama’s first cause. It is a position that possibly borders on intimating a conflict of interest. This was the argument that stayed my hand at the opening of the play, and it remains true, even though I have changed my mind on the point of keeping silence altogether. 

Consequently, it is my wish that what follows not be confused for a professional analysis, but rather to be taken exactly for what it is: the recollection of the man who had the privilege to accompany to the play his good friend who is reflected in the play’s featuring character, Sherlock Holmes.

I do not pretend that Holmes agreed to attend one showing of the play for any reason but to please me, when I asked if he might come. I acquired for us two seats in the darkest echelon of the theatre, from which place I looked on with my glasses, though Holmes’s eyes were keen enough on their own. I also bought our tickets under a friend’s name, and kept myself afterwards from sneaking backstage and reintroducing myself to the performance’s leading man, the playwright for whom I once assumed the role of consultant myself. To be clear, Holmes didn’t ask for those quiet considerations from me, but I made them on his behalf with the aim of making him more comfortable, as he is not the social type.

Contrary to Holmes’s initial concerns, I was not anxious for the crowd’s approval or, out of some misplaced envy, disapproval. A lifetime in partnership with a candid reviewer has perhaps made me a less sensitive writer than most others, and so it was with a light heart that I was able to enjoy those scenes drawn almost verbatim from my journals. In fact, I found the play enjoyable in general. The triple tracks of the small-time gang of the Larrabees and Prince, the protagonist Holmes and his assistants Forman and Billy the page-boy, and the vengeful criminal mastermind and his cold-hearted men at the end of the thread all weaved together well. I cannot recall seeing another play with quite the same impeccable detail of the settings, nor one that also used light and music cues alone to signify a change in scene. 

I will briefly add that the costumes had a special appeal to my eye. The _Strand_ illustrator, skilled those he is, could not have better portrayed Holmes as dramatically as did the leading man, in one moment excited into action by the thrill of the chase while dressed in the ready ulster and inevitable deerstalker, in the next moment indolent in a heavy dressing gown with a pipe in his fingers five times the length of any ever owned by the real man. The fair-haired leading woman, too, with her air of strength despite her evil circumstances, was a pretty attraction in her own right. I also thought that the man portraying Holmes’s infamous nemesis, though not recognizable by dint of any signature hat or coat, moved with a frighteningly sinister sway from side to side, and from place to place.

Such was my unsophisticated perspective. Meanwhile, sitting silently at my side, Holmes watched the play in the scholarly manner of a student attending to a two-hour university lecture. He did not smirk or laugh at his double’s quick-fire deductions, the clerical disguise, or the clever ruse with the gleam of his cigar. I do recall seeing Holmes’s focused eyes twitch once, at the first instance of romantic music, during the scene when the girl Alice draws away from three villainous men to instead side with the apparently doomed Holmes. Holmes has told me that he acted while at university, and I found myself wondering if it was from those experiences that he had learned to watch stage performances in an academic light, of it that was merely due to his systemically logical approach in everything he did.

Directly the show ended, I was all curiosity to canvas his views; however, it was late, and I had no wish to bother him. We did not speak of the play at length, therefore, until some little time after he had taken my arm and we had quit the noise and lights of the theatre. We were walking unhurriedly under an evening sky to the station, when Holmes, who seemed to be enjoying the calm exercise, surprised me by breaking the companionable silence to ask me for my own views.

“What did you make of it, Watson?” he asked. “You seemed to take it very well.”

“Well, yes, I think it is a good play. I confess, I rather like how the heroes, the villains, and half their tricks are revealed already to the audience before the tricks are ever played, and the mystery of the piece is all in seeing how the heroes will come alive to the hidden danger they are in, and avert it. I think that it is a refreshing change from the mysteries of real life, which are so often impenetrably thick until the very end.” Abruptly, I smirked indulgently at my companion. “Thick, that is, until you explain them.”

He forgave me with a small smile. “Indeed, there was none of my bad habit of saving grand reveals until the end. I find it curious,” he said, “how a play about a detective can manage to venture so rarely into the art of detection.”

I disagreed. “It appeared to me that there were several clear moments of it. There was the deduction that the secretly healthy Mrs Larrabee was not the true Alice Faulkner of ailing health, for example, by inducing her to play piano. There was also the old gimmick with the alarm of fire to make Miss Faulkner reveal where she had hid the letters.”

“Yes, there were a few moments of action,” he replied unconvincingly. 

I took his bait. “What about you? Did you like the play, Holmes?”

He inhaled and exhaled pointedly. “It was fair,” he said.

“You do not sound very enthusiastic.”

“I might have enjoyed it more, if it were a finished study. It strikes me as incomplete.” 

“Incomplete!” I repeated in disbelief. “But it is a full four-act play! There must have been fifteen or twenty roles on stage, and often five at a time.”

“There were twenty characters exactly,” Holmes said, “and it was quite too many. I’m not in the habit of sending off hired minions to do my work for me, except for the rare instances when I tip Billy to do an extra job, or, even rarer, rally round my band of irregulars. The resourceful Billy on stage came perilously close to being the star of the show! I should have preferred to see your character play a larger part instead, beyond the capacity of the worried friend in only the second and fourth acts.”

The unexpected and somewhat indirect flattery was both gratifying and misplaced. Holmes has become more sentimental in his retirement than he was in earlier years, at least where I am concerned. “That is kind of you to say, but the adventure is hardly about me. I gather they did give my character a little importance in the way of humanizing yours. Besides, I only throw myself in for contrast, as far as my own journals are concerned.”

Holmes gave a short laugh. “So I have heard you say before! My dear Watson, there is more to a tale, even a romantically fictionalized one, than plot devices, contrast, and dramatic irony. There is motivation, and meaning. It was these that were incomplete.”

“The motivation was clear to me. A nobleman played with the heart of Miss Faulkner’s sister, who was thence driven to suicide; Miss Faulkner keeps the nobleman’s incriminating letters, and the nobleman engages the great Sherlock Holmes to retrieve those letters; at the same time, a gang of thieves tries to take Miss Faulkner’s letters from her, to sell off to the nobleman. And then in a warehouse-turned-bunker there’s the frustrated nemesis, who the gang of thieves turns to when your character defeats them.”

“I fancy you mean the double of the late lamented Professor Moriarty?”

“Yes, him. Is that not clear enough motivation?”

“It is perfectly clear,” Holmes said, “and perfectly irrelevant!”

I sighed. “I’m afraid you’ve quite lost me, Holmes.”

“You have summarized the plot very well, Watson, but that was not the crux of the play’s meaning, only its vehicle. I submit to you that if you were to pull out, at random, any other gentleman or lady out from tonight’s audience, and I posed to this person the question, ‘What was the play about?’, then that person will answer me, ‘The romance of Sherlock Holmes and Alice Faulkner!’.”

This was the exposition I had been waiting for from my friend. When the first moment I learned that the playwright intended to thrust a love story onto Holmes’s counterpart, I had known it to be laughably out of character. Holmes, who had already known of the play’s romance from long ago, never betrayed the least offence or interest in it. Here, however, I was finally to become privy to the thoughts he had long kept to himself.

I didn’t know it, but he was about to thoroughly astonish me, and overturn all my expectations for yet another time in our rich association.

“It would be a correct answer, moreover,” he continued. “The plot really does circle around the love story. There was hardly any mention of the wronged sister, or of the guilty gentleman who, in fact, got off scot-free at the finish. Rather, the beginning of the drama is focused on the wayward loneliness of my double and Miss Faulkner, the climax was of their coming together in the very heat of danger, and the ending was their taking one another into each other’s arms. To think,” he scoffed, “that the play ended on such an emotional note!”

“Is that so terrible, Holmes? It was heart-warming, and seemed a proper ending to me,” I dared to say. 

He was lightning-quick to respond. “Even though my character and his sweetheart, so apparently in love, have met no more than three times in the course of events? Their brief emotional—shall I call it, infatuation?—was no ending at all. Infatuation has its advantages, but when did love enter into it? Love was never explored—yet it is the only possible ending to complete the story!”

I stopped in my tracks, taken aback by a stance that seemed very unusual for his analytic mind. “What do you mean?”

Holmes gave me a strange look. It was plain that he was working to find a coherent way to voice his thoughts, and working to convince himself to voice them at all to me. He took his arm from mine, and rubbed his chin, while his gaze was drawn down to the pavement, or somewhere inward.

I supposed he meant to be uncommunicative for some time. Indeed, there was a considerable pause, but it was not prolonged; eventually, he raised his hands to parallel one another, as if he were holding some invisible object of great size between his palms.

“Imagine an enormous bath-tub, if you would,” Holmes said quietly. “My character carries inside him everywhere this bath-tub. It is empty. He tries to fill it with cocaine,” he slowly pantomimed filling the bath, “or Moriarty’s schemes, and though they fill the bath temporarily, these excitements soon drain,” he illustrated the departing rush, “and always the bath is empty again. It must be filled by more cases, or more chemical studies, or, failing those, more artificial stimulants. He grabs for anything that will fill the void.” The motions of his hands were purposeful, and followed his explanation. “From the midst of this vicious cycle, my character falls into infatuation with the beautiful Miss Faulkner. The delightful sensations involved fill the bath to overflowing.” The bath was topped to the brim. “It will be sweet, for a time, while the first exhilarations and mysteries of passion remain. After that…” The bath’s level gradually descended. “After that, the bath will be empty again, and then what becomes of our childishly enamoured duo? What will they be to each other, then?” He ceased his pantomime with a deceptively casual shrug.

His words and his passion moved me. I was too struck by his abruptly poignant opinion to say anything.

“Therein lies the elusive ending.” Suddenly, Holmes broke his seriousness with, an almost nostalgic smile. “I commend the play for having bravery enough to show me unashamed at my old habit of cocaine in Baker Street. Yet the play was careless enough not to show its audience who it was who finally weaned me off the drug, or how he’d done it, through years of effort and patience.” 

I blushed, and, in my humility, half-thankful that the darkness of the night obscured at least some of my reaction. “Holmes, really.”

Holmes clapped a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It is the truth, old fellow. Infatuation can fill the bath, but it is love that plugs the hole. Be it love between spouses, or love between close friends; that is the vital component of our adventures that your distinguished colleague overlooked. The eternal struggle of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t end, my dear Watson, until he finds something with which to plug the bath.”

I made no effort to conceal the way the insight of his metaphor had affected me. I began, despite myself and my own trade, to also see how the play might be incomplete. “Why, that’s beautiful, Holmes,” I said. “I’m afraid, though, that your sentiment is rather hard to craft into a piece of entertainment.”

His face screwed up into the innocently bewildered expression of a child. I gathered from his face that the profound notion he had just said to me must have seemed the most natural feeling in the world. “Is it so difficult? It took me under five minutes to relate it to you.” 

My heart was with him, but hard-earned writer’s instincts drove my rebuttal. “Yes, you did, and very well, but what you have said may not be so entertaining as the classic of the hero falling in love with the damsel in distress. The attitude you are talking about touches very close to the mundane aspects of everyday life. The public is not terribly interested in what comes of romances after they are settled, you know.” 

“Yes.” His answering nod was measured and unhesitating. “You are quite right. They aren’t.” He looked up at the cloudy sky. “You might not guess it, Watson, but I am thinking of that box you keep of your records of the more unpalatable cases. There’s the case involving the criminal who got away, and the one with the secret other marriage, and the couple about the murders of children, or the one with the murder-suicide that transpired tragically in front of us.” He looked at me again. “Those are all subjects that are exceedingly worthy of attention, and yet you refuse to write on them, for fear the public won’t care for them.”

“I’ve told you before that there are some stories society doesn’t want to hear, and which _The Strand Magazine_ wouldn’t want to print,” I replied patiently. “Maybe in a hundred years, when society is more receptive, some new playwright will come along and turn my notes of the unsung cases into plays.”

“Ah, you think so? Well, while he’s at it,” Holmes added, “he or someone else might give Sherlock Holmes a proper ending.”

“What sort of ending would that be?”

There was something in my solicitous question that made him suddenly very passionate. He put his hands on his hips, and stood up straight. “Kill him off,” he declared with the bravado of an actor, “or marry him off to Miss Faulkner, and marvel at the drama of how they learn to put up with each other!”

I laughed at his private joke—a joke that none but Holmes’s long-forbearing friend of many years will enjoy to its fullest—and he took my arm again.

It is my wish that the above is satisfactory to those readers curious to hear of my friend’s philosophical perspective of a play that, merely by its existence, does him a great honour. I hope, as well, that it is clear that I have chosen to share his perspective, not because of who he is, but because of the singular content of what he has said. For those who read in search of a recommendation for or against the production, I will conclude with a simple remark: what better praise can there be for a play, but a demand for a sequel?

JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.


End file.
